This has been a spectacular autumn for dark films. We've seen a few movies with a family-unfriendly vibe gain a remarkably large audience. Nightcrawler came from out of nowhere to give us an unforgettable, creepy performance from Jake Gyllenhaal that was rewarded with a surprisingly huge draw at the box-office. Birdman's egomaniacal extravagance is mustering a lot of Oscar talk. And Gone Girl delivered some uncomfortable American imagery to mall multiplexes around the country.

But one of these surprising dark films—probably the best of the lot, in fact—isn't getting the kind of audience it deserves. I'm talking about Whiplash. After I watched Whiplash, I insisted that Charles Mudede watch it, and we both responded in the exact same way—with near-speechless enthusiasm. If I was the sort of critic who made a top-ten-films-of-the-year list, Whiplash would near the top of mine. If I was the sort of critic who posted lists of who should win Academy Awards this year, J.K. Simmons would be the actor to beat. Hell, I'm going to resort to outright demands: you have to see this film, preferably in a movie theater.

I can understand why Whiplash slid under the radar for everyone. Teaching movies almost always suck, because they usually resort to boring platitudes and sentimentality. Movies about music are difficult to get right, because the impulse to talk about the music gets in the way of letting the music breathe. (And the music is almost never as good as the talk about the music would imply.) And so Whiplash, about a demanding jazz teacher who pushes a promising young student too far in a quest for perfection, is a premise that's pregnant with potential bad moves. Miraculously, it avoids all of them.

The first and most obvious saving grace of Whiplash is the acting. Simmons is spectacular, giving the best performance in a career littered with great performances. And Miles Teller, as his student, knows just how to play with Simmons's performance. He's not interested in trying to compete with the older actor—that would be impossible—but he instead complements Simmons, allowing him to take his driven teacher to heights he would never otherwise be able to hit. The relationship between teacher and student in this movie is so important; you could lose an audience for good in the first twenty minutes if the teacher felt too abusive or the student felt too pliable. This is their movie, and their relationship—hurtful, impressed, prideful, wounded—is so complex that it offers the film the tenseness of a thriller. When you sit down to watch Whiplash, you'll be shocked to discover it's over in the blink of an eye.

But those performances wouldn't be there, obviously, without writer/director Damien Chazelle. Half of Chazelle's skill, it seems, is knowing how to get the fuck out of the way—of the music, of the performances, of his script. He isn't afraid to let jazz music dominate a scene, without long stultifying monologues about the beauty of jazz to stink up the place. He'll let Simmons make Teller impossibly uncomfortable, because that discomfort bleeds into the audience, who by the end of some of the practice scenes are squirming in their seats. And he leaves so many questions—about art, about the line between teaching and bullying, about greatness—wide open, for the audience to resolve on their own. Whiplash is obsessed with musical perfection, and that obsession pays off: there's not one wrong note in this entire movie. Go see it in the theaters this weekend. It deserves a gigantic audience.